Making Fullscreen Experiences

We have the ability to easily make immersive fullscreen websites and
applications, but like anything on the web there are a couple of ways to do it.
This is especially important now that more browsers are supporting an "installed
web app" experience which launch fullscreen.

Getting your app or site fullscreen

There are several ways that a user or developer can get a web app fullscreen.

Request the browser go fullscreen in response to a user gesture.

Install the app to the home screen.

Fake it: auto-hide the address bar.

Request the browser go fullscreen in response to a user gesture

Not all platforms are equal.
iOS Safari doesn't have a fullscreen API, but we do on Chrome on Android,
Firefox, and IE 11+. Most applications you build will use a combination of the
JS API and the CSS selectors provided by the fullscreen specification. The main
JS API's that you need to care about when building a fullscreen experience are:

document.fullscreenElement (currently prefixed in Chrome, Firefox, and IE)
returns true if any of the elements are in fullscreen mode.

Note: You will notice that in the prefixed versions there is a lot of
inconsistency between the casing of the 'S' in screen. This is awkward, but
this is the problem with specs that are in flight.

When your app is fullscreen you no longer have the browser's UI controls
available to you. This changes the way that users interact with your
experience. They don't have the standard navigation controls such as Forwards
and Backwards; they don't have their escape hatch that is the Refresh button. It's
important to cater for this scenario. You can use some CSS selectors to help
you change the style and presentation of your site when the browser enters
fullscreen mode.

The above example is a little contrived; I've hidden all the complexity around
the use of vendor prefixes.

Note: Damn you, vendor prefixes!

The actual code is a lot more complex. Mozilla
has created a very useful script that you can use to toggle fullscreen. As
you can see, the vendor prefix situation it is complex and
cumbersome compared to the specified API. Even with the slightly simplified code
below, it is still complex.

We web developers hate complexity. A nice high-level abstract API you can use
is Sindre Sorhus' Screenfull.js module
which unifies the two slightly different JS API's and vendor prefixes into one
consistent API.

Fullscreen API Tips

Making the document fullscreen

Figure 1: Fullscreen on the body element.

It is natural to think that you take the body element fullscreen, but if you are
on a WebKit or Blink based rendering engine you will see it has an odd effect of
shrinking the body width to the smallest possible size that will contain all the
content. (Mozilla Gecko is fine.)

Figure 2: Fullscreen on the document element.

To fix this, use the document element instead of the body element:

document.documentElement.requestFullscreen();

Making a video element fullscreen

To make a video element fullscreen is exactly the same as making any other
element fullscreen. You call the requestFullscreen method on the video
element.

If your <video> element doesn't have the controls attribute defined,
there's no way for the user to control the video once they are fullscreen. The
recommended way to do this is to have a basic container that wraps the video and
the controls that you want the user to see.

Using these patterns, you can detect when fullscreen is running and adapt your
user interface appropriately, for example:

By providing a link back to the start page

By Providing a mechanism to close dialogs or travel backwards

Launching a page fullscreen from home screen

Launching a fullscreen web page when the user navigates to it is not possible.
Browser vendors are very aware that a fullscreen experience on every page load
is a huge annoyance, therefore a user gesture is required to enter fullscreen.
Vendors do allow users to "install" apps though, and the act of installing is a
signal to the operating system that the user wants to launch as an app on the
platform.

Across the major mobile platforms it is pretty easy to implement using either
meta tags, or manifest files as follows.

iOS

Since the launch of the iPhone, users have been able to install Web Apps to
the home screen and have them launch as full-screen web apps.

<meta name="apple-mobile-web-app-capable" content="yes">

If content is set to yes, the web application runs in full-screen mode;
otherwise, it does not. The default behavior is to use Safari to display web
content. You can determine whether a webpage is displayed in full-screen mode
using the window.navigator.standalone read-only Boolean JavaScript property.
Apple

Chrome for Android

The Chrome team has recently implemented a feature that tells the browser to
launch the page fullscreen when the user has added it to the home screen. It is
similar to the iOS Safari model.

<meta name="mobile-web-app-capable" content="yes">

You can set up your web app to have an application shortcut icon added to a
device's home screen, and have the app launch in full-screen "app mode" using
Chrome for Android's "Add to Home screen" menu item.
Google Chrome

A better option is to use the Web App Manifest.

Web App Manifest (Chrome, Opera, Firefox, Samsung)

The Manifest for Web applications
is a simple JSON file that gives you, the
developer, the ability to control how your app appears to the user in the areas
that they would expect to see apps (for example the mobile home screen), direct
what the user can launch and, more importantly, how they can launch it. In the
future the manifest will give you even more control over your app, but right now
we are just focusing on how your app can be launched. Specifically:

Telling the browser about your manifest

Describing how to launch

Once you have the manifest created and it is hosted on your site, all you need
to do is add a link tag from all your pages that encompass your app, as follows:

<link rel="manifest" href="/manifest.json">

Chrome has supported Manifests since version 38 for Android (October 2014)
and it gives you the control over how your web app appears when it is installed
to the home screen (via the short_name, name and icons properties) and how it
should be launched when the user clicks on the launch icon (via start_url,
display and orientation).

An example manifest is shown below. It doesn't show everything that can be in a
manifest.

This feature is entirely progressive and allows you create better, more
integrated experiences for users of a browser that supports the feature.

When a user adds your site or app to the home screen, there is an intent by the
user to treat it like an app. This means you should aim to direct the user to
the functionality of your app rather than a product landing page. For example,
if the user is required to sign-in to your app, then that is a good page to
launch.

Utility apps

The majority of utility apps will benefit from this immediately. For those
apps you'll likely want them launched standalone just alike every other app
on a mobile platform. To tell an app to launch standalone, add this the Web
App Manifest:

"display": "standalone"

Games

The majority of games will benefit from a manifest immediately. The vast
majority of games will want to launch full-screen and forced a specific
orientation.

If you are developing a vertical scroller or a game like Flappy Birds then you
will most likely want your game to always be in portrait mode.

"display": "fullscreen",
"orientation": "portrait"

If on the other hand you are building a puzzler or a game like X-Com, then you
will probably want the game to always use the landscape orientation.

"display": "fullscreen",
"orientation": "landscape"

News sites

News sites in most cases are pure content-based experiences. Most developers
naturally wouldn't think of adding a manifest to a news site. The manifest
will let you define what to launch (the front page of your news site) and
how to launch it (fullscreen or as a normal browser tab).

The choice is up to you and how you think your users will like to access your
experience. If you want your site to have all the browser chrome that you would
expect a site to have, you can set the display to browser.

"display": "browser"

If you want your news site to feel like the majority of news-centric apps treat
their experiences as apps and remove all web-like chrome from the UI, you can
do this by setting display to standalone.

"display": "standalone"

Fake it: auto-hide the address bar

You can "fake fullscreen" by auto-hiding the address bar as follows:

window.scrollTo(0,1);

Caution: I am telling you this as a friend. It exists. It is a thing, but it
is a hack. Please don't use it. — Paul

This is a pretty simple method, the page loads and the browser bar is told to
get out of the way. Unfortunately it is not standardized and not well
supported. You also have to work around a bunch of quirks.

For example browsers often restore the position on the page when the user
navigates back to it. Using window.scrollTo overrides this, which annoys
the user. To work around this you have to store the last position in
localStorage, and deal with the edge cases (for example, if the user has the
page open in multiple windows).

UX guidelines

When you are building a site that takes advantage of full screen there are a
number of potential user experience changes that you need to be aware of to
be able to build a service your users will love.

Don't rely on navigation controls

iOS does not have a hardware back button or refresh gesture. Therefore you must
ensure that users can navigate throughout the app without getting locked in.

You can detect if you are running in a fullscreen mode or an installed mode
easily on all the major platforms.

iOS

On iOS you can use the navigator.standalone boolean to see if the user has
launched from the home screen or not.

Web App Manifest (Chrome, Opera, Samsung)

When launching as an installed app, Chrome is not running in true fullscreen
experience so document.fullscreenElement returns null and the CSS selectors
don't work.

When the user requests fullscreen via a gesture on your site, the standard
fullscreen API's are available including the CSS pseudo selector that lets you
adapt your UI to react to the fullscreen state like the following

If the users launches your site from the home screen the display-mode media
query will be set to what was defined in the Web App Manifest. In the case of
pure fullscreen it will be:

@media (display-mode: fullscreen) {
}

If the user launches the application in standalone mode, the display-mode
media query will be standalone:

@media (display-mode: standalone) {
}

Firefox

When the user requests fullscreen via your site or the user launches the app in
fullscreen mode all the standard fullscreen API's are available, including the
CSS pseudo selector, which lets you adapt your UI to react to the fullscreen state
like the following:

Specification

Keep the user in the fullscreen experience

The fullscreen API can be a little finicky sometimes. Browser vendors don't want
to lock users in a fullscreen page so they have developed mechanisms to break
out of fullscreen as soon as they possibly can. This means you can't build a
fullscreen website that spans multiple pages because:

Changing the URL programmatically by using window.location =
"http://example.com" breaks out of fullscreen.

A user clicking on an external link inside your page will exit fullscreen.

Changing the URL via the navigator.pushState API will also break out of the
fullscreen experience.

You have two options if you want to keep the user in a fullscreen experience:

Use the installable web app mechanisms to go fullscreen.

Manage your UI and app state using the # fragment.

By using the #syntax to update the url (window.location = "#somestate"), and
listening to the window.onhashchange event you can use the browser's own
history stack to manage changes in the application state, allow the user to use
their hardware back buttons, or offer a simple programmatic back button
experience by using the history API as follows:

window.history.go(-1);

Let the user choose when to go fullscreen

There is nothing more annoying to the user than a website doing something
unexpected. When a user navigates to your site don't try and trick them into
fullscreen.

Don't intercept the first touch event and call requestFullscreen().

It is annoying.

Browsers may decided to prompt the user at some point in the future about
allowing the app to take up the fullscreen.

If you want to launch apps fullscreen think about using the install
experiences for each platform.

Don't spam the user to install your app to a home screen

If you plan on offering a fullscreen experience via the installed app mechanisms
be considerate to the user.

Be discreet. Use a banner or footer to let them know they can install the
app.

If they dismiss the prompt, don't show it again.

On a users first visit they are unlikely to want to install the app unless
they are happy with your service. Consider prompting them to install after
a positive interaction on your site.

If a user visits your site regularly and they don't install the app, they are
unlikely to install your app in the future. Don't keep spamming them.

Conclusion

While we don't have a fully standardized and implemented API, using some of the
guidance presented in this article you can easily build experiences that take
advantage of the user's entire screen, irrespective of the client.

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